I never met Hrant Dink, a misfortune
that will be mine for time to come. From what I know of him, of what
he wrote, what he said and did, how he lived his life, I know that
had I been here in Istanbul a year ago I would have been among the
one hundred thousand people who walked with his coffin in dead silence
through the wintry streets of this city, with banners saying, "We
are all Armenians", "We are all Hrant Dink". Perhaps
I'd have carried the one that said, "One and a half million plus
one".* [*One-and-a-half million is the number of Armenians who
were systematically murdered by the Ottoman Empire in the genocide
in Anatolia in the spring of 1915. The Armenians, the largest Christian
minority living under Islamic Turkic rule in the area, had lived in
Anatolia for more than 2,500 years.]

***
In a way, my battle is like yours. But while in Turkey there's silence,
in India, there is celebration.
***

I wonder
what thoughts would have gone through my head as I walked beside his
coffin. Maybe I would have heard a reprise of the voice of Araxie
Barsamian, mother of my friend David Barsamian, telling the story
of what happened to her and her family. She was ten years old in 1915.
She remembered the swarms of grasshoppers that arrived in her village,
Dubne, which was north of the historic city Dikranagert, now Diyarbakir.
The village elders were alarmed, she said, because they knew in their
bones that the grasshoppers were a bad omen. They were right;
the end came in a few months, when the wheat in the fields was ready
for harvesting.

"When
we left...(we were) 25 in the family," Araxie Barsamian says.
"They took all the men folks. They asked my father, 'Where is
your ammunition?' He says, 'I sold it.' So they says, 'Go get it.'
So he went to the Kurd town to get it, they beat him and took all
his clothes. When he came back there-this my mother tells me story-when
he came back there, naked body, he went in the jail, they cut his
arms...so he die in jail.

And they
took all the mens in the field, they tied their hands, and they shooted,
killed every one of them."

Araxie
and the other women in her family were deported. All of them perished
except Araxie. She was the lone survivor.

This is,
of course, a single testimony that comes from a history that is denied
by the Turkish government, and many Turks as well.

I am not
here to play the global intellectual, to lecture you, or to fill the
silence in this country that surrounds the memory (or the forgetting)
of the events that took place in Anatolia in 1915. That is what Hrant
Dink tried to do, and paid for with his life.

***
Most genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards has been part
of Europe's search for lebensraum.
***

The day
I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets for many hours, and as
I looked around, envying the people of Istanbul their beautiful, mysterious,
thrilling city, a friend pointed out to me young boys in white caps
who seemed to have suddenly appeared like a rash in the city. He explained
that they were expressing their solidarity with the child-assassin
who was wearing a white cap when he killed Hrant.

The battle
with the cap-wearers of Istanbul, of Turkey, is not my battle, it's
yours. I have my own battles to fight against other kinds of cap-wearers
and torchbearers in my country. In a way, the battles are not all
that different. There is one crucial difference, though. While in
Turkey there is silence, in India there's celebration, and I really
don't know which is worse.

In the
state of Gujarat, there was a genocide against the Muslim community
in 2002.

I use the
word Genocide advisedly, and in keeping with its definition contained
in Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The genocide began as collective
punishment for an unsolved crime-the burning of a railway coach in
which 53 Hindu pilgrims were burned to death. In a carefully planned
orgy of supposed retaliation, 2,000 Muslims were slaughtered in broad
daylight by squads of armed killers, organised by fascist militias,
and backed by the Gujarat government and the administration of the
day. Muslim women were gang-raped and burned alive.

Muslim
shops, Muslim businesses and Muslim shrines and mosques were systematically
destroyed. Some 1,50,000 people were driven from their homes.

Even today,
many of them live in ghettos-some built on garbage heaps-with no water
supply, no drainage, no streetlights, no healthcare. They live as
second-class citizens, boycotted socially and economically. Meanwhile,
the killers, police as well as civilian, have been embraced, rewarded,
promoted. This state of affairs is now considered 'normal'. To seal
the 'normality', in 2004, both Ratan Tata and Mukesh Ambani, India's
leading industrialists, publicly pronounced Gujarat a dream destination
for finance capital.

The initial
outcry in the national press has settled down. In Gujarat, the genocide
has been brazenly celebrated as the epitome of Gujarati pride, Hindu-ness,
even Indian-ness. This poisonous brew has been used twice in a row
to win state elections, with campaigns that have cleverly used the
language and apparatus of modernity and democracy. The helmsman, Narendra
Modi, has become a folk hero, called in by the BJP to campaign on
its behalf in other Indian states.

As genocides
go, the Gujarat genocide cannot compare with the people killed in
the Congo, Rwanda and Bosnia, where the numbers run into millions,
nor is it by any means the first that has occurred in India. (In 1984,
for instance, 3,000 Sikhs were massacred on the streets of Delhi with
similar impunity, by killers overseen by the Congress Party.) But
the Gujarat genocide is part of a larger, more elaborate and systematic
vision. It tells us that the wheat is ripening and the grasshoppers
have landed in mainland India.

It's an
old human habit, genocide is. It has played a sterling part in the
march of civilisation. Amongst the earliest recorded genocides is
thought to be the destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third
Punic War in 149 BC. The word itself-genocide-was coined by Raphael
Lemkin only in 1943, and adopted by the United Nations in 1948, after
the Nazi Holocaust. Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines it
as:

"Any
of the following Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or
part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing
members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members
of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life,
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or part;
imposing measures
intended to prevent births within the group; [or] forcibly transferring
children of the group to another group."

Since this
definition leaves out the persecution of political dissidents, real
or imagined, it does not include some of the greatest mass murders
in history. Personally I think the definition by Frank Chalk and Kurt
Jonassohn, authors of The History and Sociology of Genocide, is more
apt.

Genocide,
they say, "is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state
or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership
in it are defined by the perpetrator." Defined like this, genocide
would include, for example, the monumental crimes committed by Suharto
in Indonesia (1 million) Pol Pot in Cambodia (1.5 million), Stalin
in the Soviet Union (60 million), Mao in China (70 million).

All things
considered, the word extermination, with its crude evocation of pests
and vermin, of infestations, is perhaps the more honest, more apposite
word. When a set of perpetrators faces its victims, in order to go
about its business of wanton killing, it must first sever any human
connection with it. It must see its victims as sub-human, as parasites
whose eradication would be a service to society. Here, for example,
is an account of the massacre of Pequot Indians by English Puritans
led by John Mason in Connecticut in 1636:

Those that
escaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces,
others rune throw with their rapiers, so they were quickly dispatchte,
and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400
at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the
fyre, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was
the stincke and sente thereof, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice....

And here,
approximately four centuries later, is Babu Bajrangi, one of the major
lynchpins of the Gujarat genocide, recorded on camera in the sting
operation mounted by Tehelka a few months ago:

We didn't
spare a single Muslim shop, we set everything on fire...hacked, burned,
set on fire...we believe in setting them on fire because these bastards
don't want to be cremated, they're afraid of it.... I have just one
last wish...let me be sentenced to death...I don't care if I'm hanged...just
give me two days before my hanging and I will go and have a field
day in Juhapura where seven or eight lakhs of these people stay...I
will finish them off...let a few more of them die...at least 25,000
to 50,000 should die.

I hardly
need to say that Babu Bajrangi had the blessings of Narendra Modi,
the protection of the police, and the love of his people. He continues
to work and prosper as a free man in Gujarat. The one crime he cannot
be accused of is Genocide Denial.

Genocide
Denial is a radical variation on the theme of the old, frankly racist,
bloodthirsty triumphalism. It was probably evolved as an answer to
the somewhat patchy dual morality that arose in the 19th century,
when Europe was developing limited but new forms of democracy and
citizens' rights at home while simultaneously exterminating people
in their millions in her colonies. Suddenly countries and governments
began to deny or attempt to hide the genocides they had committed.
"Denial is saying, in effect," says Professor Robert Jay
Lifton, author of Hiroshima and America: Fifty Years of Denial, "that
the murderers did not murder. The victims weren't killed. The direct
consequence of denial is that it invites future genocide."

Of course
today, when genocide politics meets the Free Market, official recognition-or
denial-of holocausts and genocides is a multinational business enterprise.
It rarely has anything to do to with historical fact or forensic evidence.
Morality certainly does not enter the picture. It is an aggressive
process of high-end bargaining, that belongs more to the World Trade
Organisation than to the United Nations.

The currency
is geopolitics, the fluctuating market for natural resources, that
curious thing called futures trading and plain old economic and military
might.

In other
words, genocides are often denied for the same set of reasons as genocides
are prosecuted. Economic determinism marinated in racial/ethnic/religious/national
discrimination. Crudely, the lowering or raising of the price of a
barrel of oil (or a tonne of uranium), permission granted for a military
base, or the opening up of a country's economy could be the decisive
factor when governments adjudicate on whether a genocide did or did
not occur.

Or indeed
whether genocide will or will not occur. And if it does, whether it
will or will not be reported, and if it is, then what slant that reportage
will take. For example, the death of two million in the Congo goes
virtually unreported. Why? And was the death of a million Iraqis under
the sanctions regime, prior to the US invasion, genocide (which is
what Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq, called
it) or was it 'worth it', as Madeleine Albright, the US ambassador
to the UN, claimed? It depends on who makes the rules. Bill Clinton?
Or an Iraqi mother who has lost her child?

Since the
United States is the richest and most powerful country in the world,
it has assumed the privilege of being the World's Number One Genocide
Denier. It continues to celebrate Columbus Day, the day Christopher
Columbus arrived in the Americas, which marks the beginning of a Holocaust
that wiped out millions of native Indians, about 90 per cent of the
original population. (Lord Amherst, the man whose idea it was to distribute
blankets infected with smallpox virus to Indians, has a university
town in Massachusetts, and a prestigious liberal arts college named
after him).

In America's
second Holocaust, almost 30 million Africans were kidnapped and sold
into slavery. Well near half of them died during transportation. But
in 2002, the US delegation could still walk out of the World Conference
Against Racism in Durban, refusing to acknowledge that slavery and
the slave trade were crimes. Slavery, they insisted, was legal at
the time. The US has also refused to accept that the bombing of Tokyo,
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and Hamburg-which killed hundreds of
thousands of civilians-were crimes, let alone acts of genocide. (The
argument here is that the government didn't intend to kill civilians.
This was the first stage in the development of the concept of "collateral
damage".) Since the end of World War II, the US government has
intervened overtly, militarily, more than 400 times in 100 countries,
and covertly more than 6,000 times. This includes its invasion of
Vietnam and the extermination, with excellent intentions of course,
of three million Vietnamese (approximately 10 per cent of its population).

None of
these has been acknowledged as war crimes or genocidal acts.

"The
question is," says Robert MacNamara-whose career graph took him
from the bombing of Tokyo in 1945 (1,00,000 dead overnight) to being
the architect of the Vietnam War, to President of the World Bank-now
sitting in his comfortable chair in his comfortable home in his comfortable
country, "the question is, how much evil do you have to do in
order to do good?"

Could there
be a more perfect illustration of Robert Jay Lifton's point that the
denial of genocide invites more genocide?

And what
when victims become perpetrators? (In Rwanda, in the Congo?) What
remains to be said about Israel, created out of the debris of one
of the cruellest genocides in human history? What of its actions in
the Occupied Territories? Its burgeoning settlements, its colonisation
of
water, its new 'Security Wall' that separates Palestinian people from
their farms, from their work, from their relatives, from their children's
schools, from hospitals and healthcare? It is genocide in a fishbowl,
genocide in slow motion-meant especially to illustrate that section
of Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which says that genocide is any
act that is designed to "deliberately inflict on the group conditions
of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole
or part".

The history
of genocide tells us that it's not an aberration, an anomaly, a glitch
in the human system.

Most of
the genocidal killing from the 15th century onwards has been an integral
part of Europe's search for what the Germans famously called Lebensraum-living
space. Lebensraum was a word coined by the German geographer and zoologist
Freidrich Ratzel to describe what he thought of as the dominant human
species' natural impulse to expand its territory in its search for
not just space, but sustenance. This impulse to expansion would naturally
be at the cost of a less dominant species, a weaker species that Nazi
ideologues believed should give way, or be made to give way, to the
stronger one.

The idea
of lebensraum was set out in precise terms in 1901, but Europe had
already begun her quest for lebensraum 400 years earlier, when Columbus
landed in America. The search for lebensraum also took Europeans to
Africa: unleashing holocaust after holocaust. The Germans exterminated
almost the entire population of the Hereros in Southwest Africa; while
in the Congo, the Belgians' "experiment in commercial expansion"
cost

10 million
lives. By the last quarter of the 19th century, the British had exterminated
the aboriginal people of Tasmania, and of most of Australia.

Sven Lindqvist,
author of Exterminate the Brutes, argues that it was Hitler's quest
for lebensraum-in a world that had already been carved up by other
European countries-that led the Nazis to push through Eastern Europe
and on toward Russia. The Jews of Eastern Europe and western Russia
stood in the way of Hitler's colonial ambitions. Therefore, like the
native
people of Africa and America and Asia, they had to be enslaved or
liquidated. So, Lindqvist says, the Nazis' racist dehumanisation of
Jews cannot be dismissed as a paroxysm of insane evil. Once again,
it is a product of the familiar mix: economic determinism well marinated
in age-old racism, very much in keeping with European tradition of
the time.

It's not
a coincidence that the political party that carried out the Armenian
genocide in the Ottoman Empire, was called the Committee for Union
& Progress.

'Union'
(racial/ethnic/religious/national) and 'Progress' (economic determinism)
have long been the twin coordinates of genocide.

Armed with
this reading of history, is it reasonable to worry about whether a
country that is poised on the threshold of "progress" is
also poised on the threshold of genocide? Could the India being celebrated
all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy, possibly
be poised on the verge of committing genocide? The mere suggestion
might sound outlandish and, at this point of time, the use of the
word genocide surely unwarranted. However, if we look to the future,
and if the Tsars of Development believe in their own publicity, if
they believe that There Is No Alternative to their chosen model for
Progress, then they will inevitably have to kill, and kill in large
numbers, in order to get their way.

Advani's
chariot of fire: And so the Union project was launched

In bits
and pieces, as the news trickles in, it seems clear that the killing
and the dying has already begun.

It was
in 1989, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, that the Government
of India turned in its membership of the Non-Aligned Movement and
signed up for membership of the Completely Aligned, often referring
to itself as the 'natural ally' of Israel and the United States. (They
have at least this one thing in common-all three are engaged in overt,
neo-colonial military occupations: India in Kashmir, Israel in Palestine,
the US in Iraq.)

Almost
like clockwork, the two major national political parties, the BJP
and the Congress, embarked on a joint programme to advance India's
version of Union and Progress, whose modern-day euphemisms are Nationalism
and Development. Every now and then, particularly during elections,
they stage noisy familial squabbles, but have managed to gather into
their fold even grumbling relatives, like the Communist Party of India
(Marxist).

The Union
project offers Hindu Nationalism (which seeks to unite the Hindu vote,
vital you will admit, for a great democracy like India). The Progress
project aims at a 10 per cent annual growth rate. Both these projects
are encrypted with genocidal potential.

The Union
project has been largely entrusted to the RSS, the ideological heart,
the holding company of the BJP and its militias, the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad and the Bajrang Dal. The RSS was founded in 1925. By the
1930s, its founder, Dr Hedgewar, a fan of Benito Mussolini, had begun
to
model it overtly along the lines of Italian fascism. Hitler too was,
and is, an inspirational figure. Here are some excerpts from the RSS
Bible, We or Our Nationhood Defined by M.S. Golwalkar, who succeeded
Dr Hedgewar as head of the RSS in 1940:

Ever since
that evil day, when Moslems first landed in Hindustan, right up to
the present moment, the Hindu Nation has been gallantly fighting on
to take on these despoilers. The Race Spirit has been awakening.

Then:

In Hindustan,
land of the Hindus, lives and should live the Hindu Nation.... All
others are traitors and enemies to the National Cause, or, to take
a charitable view, idiots....

The foreign
races in Hindustan...may stay in the country, wholly subordinated
to the Hindu Nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far
less any preferential treatment-not even citizen's rights.

And again:

To keep
up the purity of its race and culture, Germany shocked the world by
her purging the country of the Semitic races-the Jews.

Race pride
at its highest has been manifested here...a good lesson for us in
Hindustan to learn and profit by.

(How do
you combat this kind of organised hatred? Certainly not with goofy
preachings of secular love.)

By the
year 2000, the RSS had more than 45,000 shakhas and an army of seven
million swayamsevaks preaching its doctrine across India. They include
India's former prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, the former home
minister and current leader of the Opposition, L.K. Advani, and, of
course, the three-times Gujarat chief minister, Narendra Modi. It
also includes senior people in the media, the police, the army, the
intelligence agencies, judiciary and the administrative services who
are informal devotees of Hindutva-the RSS ideology. These people,
unlike
politicians who come and go, are permanent members of government machinery.

But the
RSS's real power lies in the fact that it has put in decades of hard
work and has created a network of organisations at every level of
society, something that no other organisation can claim.

The BJP
is its political front. It has a trade union wing (Bharatiya Mazdoor
Sangh), a women's wing (Rashtriya Sevika Samiti), a student wing (Akhil
Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad) and an economic wing (Swadeshi Jagaran
Manch).

On June
11, 1989, Congress prime minister Rajiv Gandhi gave the RSS a gift.
He was obliging enough to open the locks of the disputed Babri Masjid
in Ayodhya, which the RSS claimed was the birthplace of Lord Ram.
At the National Executive of the BJP, the party passed a resolution
to demolish the mosque and build a temple in Ayodhya. "I'm sure
the resolution will translate into votes," said L.K. Advani.
In 1990, he criss-crossed the country on his Rath Yatra, his Chariot
of Fire, demanding the demolition of the Babri Masjid, leaving riots
and bloodshed in his wake. In 1991, the party won 120 seats in Parliament.
(It had won two in 1984). The hysteria orchestrated by Advani peaked
in 1992, when the mosque was brought down by a marauding mob. By 1998,
the BJP was in power at the Centre. Its first act in office was to
conduct a series of nuclear tests. Across the country, fascists and
corporates, princes and paupers alike, celebrated India's Hindu Bomb.
Hindutva had transcended petty party politics.

In 2002,
Narendra Modi's government planned and executed the Gujarat genocide.
In the elections that took place a few months after the genocide,
he was returned to power with an overwhelming majority. He ensured
complete impunity for those who had participated in the killings.
In the rare case where there has been a conviction, it is of course
the lowly footsoldiers, and not the masterminds, who stand in the
dock.

Impunity
is an essential prerequisite for genocidal killing.

India has
a great tradition of granting impunity to mass killers. I could fill
volumes with the details.

In a democracy,
for impunity after genocide, you have to "apply through proper
channels". Procedure is everything. In the case of several massacres,
the lawyers that the Gujarat government appointed as public prosecutors
had actually already appeared for the accused. Several of them belonged
to the RSS or the VHP and were openly hostile to those they were supposedly
representing. Survivor witnesses found that, when they went to the
police to file reports, the police would record their statements inaccurately,
or refuse to record the names of the perpetrators. In several cases,
when survivors had seen members of their families being killed (and
burned alive so their bodies could not be found), the police would
refuse to register cases of murder.

Ehsan Jaffri,
the Congress politician and poet who had made the mistake of campaigning
against Modi in the Rajkot elections, was publicly butchered. (By
a mob led by a fellow Congressman.) In the words of a man who took
part in the savagery:

Five people
held him, then someone struck him with a sword...chopped off his hand,
then his legs...then everything else...after cutting him to pieces,
they put him on the wood they'd piled and set him on fire. Burned
him alive.

The Ahmedabad
Commissioner of Police, P.C. Pandey, was kind enough to visit the
neighbourhood while the mob lynched Jaffri, murdered 70 people, and
gang-raped 12 women before burning them alive. After Modi was re-elected,
Pandey was promoted, and made Gujarat's Director-General of Police.
The entire killing apparatus remains in place.

The Supreme
Court in Delhi made a few threatening noises, but eventually put the
matter into cold storage. The Congress and the Communist parties made
a great deal of noise, but did nothing.

In the
Tehelka sting operation, broadcast recently on a news channel at prime
time, apart from Babu Bajrangi, killer after killer recounted how
the genocide had been planned and executed, how Modi and senior politicians
and police officers had been personally involved. None of this information
was new, but there they were, the butchers, on the news networks,
not just admitting to, but boasting about their crimes. The overwhelming
public reaction to the sting was not outrage, but suspicion about
its timing. Most people believed that the expose would help Modi win
the elections again. Some even believed, quite outlandishly, that
he had engineered the sting. He did win the elections. And this time,
on the ticket of Union and Progress. A committee all unto himself.
At BJP rallies, thousands of adoring supporters now wear plastic Modi
masks, chanting slogans of death. The fascist democrat has physically
mutated into a million little fascists. These are the joys of democracy.
Who in Nazi Germany would have dared to put on a Hitler mask?

Preparations
to recreate the 'Gujarat blueprint' are currently in different stages
in the BJP-ruled states of Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan,
Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka.

To commit
genocide, says Peter Balkian, scholar of the Armenian genocide, you
have to marginalise a sub-group for a long time. This criterion has
been well met in India. The Muslims of India have been systematically
marginalised and have now joined the Adivasis and Dalits, who have
not just been marginalised, but dehumanised by caste Hindu society
and its scriptures, for years, for centuries. (There was a time when
they were dehumanised in order to be put to work doing things that
caste Hindus would not do.

Now, with
technology, even that labour is becoming redundant.) Part of the RSS's
work involves setting Dalits against Muslims, Adivasis against Dalits.

While the
'people' were engaged with the Union project and its doctrine of hatred,
India's Progress project was proceeding apace. The new regime of privatisation
and liberalisation resulted in the sale of the country's natural resources
and public infrastructure to private corporations. It has created
an unimaginably wealthy upper class and growing middle classes who
have naturally become militant evangelists for the new dispensation.

The Progress
project has its own tradition of impunity and subterfuge, no less
horrific than the elaborate machinery of the Union project. At the
heart of it lies the most powerful institution in India, the Supreme
Court, which is rapidly becoming a pillar of Corporate Power, issuing
order after order allowing for the building of dams, the interlinking
of rivers, indiscriminate mining, the destruction of forests and water
systems. All of this could be described as ecocide-a prelude perhaps
to genocide. (And to criticise the court is a criminal offence, punishable
by imprisonment).

Ironically,
the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist
struggle ever waged in India-the secession of the middle and upper
classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere
where they merge with the rest of the world's elite. This Kingdom
in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from
the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programmes,
morality plays, transport systems, malls and intellectuals. And in
case you are beginning to think it's all joy-joy, you're wrong. It
also has its own tragedies, its own environmental issues (parking
problems, urban air pollution); its own class struggles. An organisation
called Youth for Equality, for example, has taken up the issue of
Reservations, because it feels Upper Castes are discriminated against
by India's pulverised Lower Castes. It has its own People's Movements
and candle-light vigils (Justice for Jessica, the model who was shot
in a bar) and even its own People's Car (the Wagon for the Volks launched
by the Tata Group recently). It even has its own dreams that take
the form of TV advertisements in which Indian CEOs (smeared with Fair
& Lovely Face Cream, Men's) buy over international corporations,
including an imaginary East India Company. They are ushered into their
plush new offices by fawning white women (who look as though they're
longing to be laid, the final prize of conquest) and applauding white
men, ready to make way for the new kings. Meanwhile, the crowd in
the stadium roars to its feet (with credit cards in
its pockets) chanting 'India! India!'

But there
is a problem, and the problem is lebensraum. A Kingdom needs its lebensraum.
Where will the Kingdom in the Sky find lebensraum? The Sky Citizens
look towards the Old Nation. They see Adivasis sitting on the bauxite
mountains of Orissa, on the iron ore in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh.
They see the people of Nandigram (Muslims, Dalits) sitting on prime
land, which really ought to be a chemical hub. They see thousands
of acres of farm land, and think, these really ought to be Special
Economic Zones for our industries; they see the rich fields of Singur
and know this really ought to be a car factory for the People's Car.
They think: that's our bauxite, our iron ore, our uranium. What are
those people doing on our land? What's our water doing in their rivers?
What's our timber doing in their trees?

If you
look at a map of India's forests, its mineral wealth and the homelands
of the Adivasi people, you'll see that they're stacked up over each
other.

So, in
reality, those who we call poor are the truly wealthy. But when the
Sky Citizens cast their eyes over the land, they see superfluous people
sitting on precious resources. The Nazis had a phrase for them-überzahligen
Essern, superfluous eaters.

The struggle
for lebensraum, Friedrich Ratzel said after closely observing the
struggle between Native Indians and their European colonisers in North
America, is an annihilating struggle. Annihilation doesn't necessarily
mean the physical extermination of people-by bludgeoning, beating,
burning, bayoneting, gassing, bombing or shooting them. (Except sometimes.
Particularly when they try to put up a fight. Because then they become
Terrorists.) Historically, the most efficient form of genocide has
been to displace people from their homes, herd them together and block
their access to food and water. Under these conditions, they die without
obvious violence and often in far greater numbers. "The Nazis
gave the Jews a star on their coats and crowded them into 'reserves',"
Sven Lindqvist writes, "just as the Indians, the Hereros, the
Bushmen, the Amandabele, and all the other children of the stars had
been crowded together. They died on their own when food supply to
the reserves was cut off."

The historian
Mike Davis says that between 12 million and 29 million people starved
to death in India in the great famine between 1876 and 1892, while
Britain continued to export food and raw material from India. In a
democracy, Amartya Sen says, we are unlikely to have Famine. So in
place of China's Great Famine, we have India's Great Malnutrition.
(India hosts 57 million-more than a third-of the world's undernourished
children.)

With the
possible exception of China, India today has the largest population
of internally displaced people in the world. Dams alone have displaced
more than 30 million people. The displacement is being enforced with
court decrees or at gunpoint by policemen, by government-controlled
militias or corporate thugs. (In Nandigram, even the CPI(M) had its
own
armed militia.) The displaced are being herded into tenements, camps
and resettlement colonies where, cut off from a means of earning a
living, they spiral into poverty.

In the
state of Chhattisgarh, being targeted by corporates for its wealth
of iron ore, there's a different technique. In the name of fighting
Maoist rebels, hundreds of villages have been forcibly evacuated and
almost 40,000 people moved into police camps. The government is arming
some of them, and has created Salwa Judum, a 'people's militia'. While
the poorest fight the poorest, in conditions that approach civil war,
the Tata and Essar groups have been quietly negotiating for the rights
to mine iron ore in Chhattisgarh. Can we establish a connection? We
wouldn't dream of it. Even though the Salwa Judum was announced a
day after the Memorandum of Understanding between the Tata Group and
the government was signed.

It's not
surprising that very little of this account of events makes it into
the version of the New India currently on the market. That's because
what is on sale is another form of denial-the creation of what Robert
Jay Lifton calls a "counterfeit universe". In this universe,
systemic horrors are converted into temporary lapses, attributable
to flawed individuals, and a more 'balanced' happier world is presented
in place of the real one. The balance is spurious: often Union and
Progress are set off against each other, a liberal-secular critique
of the Union project being used to legitimise the depredations of
the Progress project. Those at the top of the food chain, those who
have no reason to want to alter the status quo, are most likely to
be the manufacturers of the "counterfeit universe".

Their job
is to patrol the border, diffuse rage, delegitimise anger, and broker
a ceasefire.

Consider
the response of Shahrukh Khan to a question about Narendra Modi. "I
don't know him personally...I have no opinion...," he says. "Personally
they have never been unkind to me." Ramachandra Guha, liberal
historian and founding member of the New India Foundation, a corporate-funded
trust, advises us in his book-as well as in a series of highly publicised
interviews-that the Gujarat government is not really fascist, and
the genocide was just an aberration that has corrected itself after
elections.

Editors
and commentators in the 'secular' national press, having got over
their outrage at the Gujarat genocide, now assess Modi's administrative
skills, which most of them are uniformly impressed by. The editor
of The Hindustan Times said, "Modi may be a mass murderer, but
he's our mass murderer", and went on to air his dilemmas about
how to deal with a mass murderer who is also a "good" chief
minister.

In this
'counterfeit' version of India, in the realm of culture, in the new
Bollywood cinema, in the boom in Indo-Anglian literature, the poor,
for the most part, are simply absent. They have been erased in advance.
(They only put in an appearance as the smiling beneficiaries of Micro-Credit
Loans, Development Schemes and charity meted out by ngos.)

Last summer,
I happened to wander into a cool room in which four beautiful young
girls with straightened hair and porcelain skin were lounging, introducing
their puppies to one another. One of them turned to me and said, "I
was on holiday with my family and I found an old essay of yours about
dams and stuff? I was asking my brother if he knew about what a bad
time these Dalits and Adivasis were having, being displaced and all....
I mean just being kicked out of their homes 'n stuff like that? And
you know, my brother's such a jerk, he said they're the ones who are
holding India back. They should be exterminated. Can you imagine?"

The trouble
is, I could. I can.

The puppies
were sweet. I wondered whether dogs could ever imagine exterminating
each other. They're probably not progressive enough.

That evening,
I watched Amitabh Bachchan on TV, appearing in a commercial for The
Times of India's 'India Poised' campaign. The TV anchor introducing
the campaign said it was meant to inspire people to leave behind the
"constraining ghosts of the past". To choose optimism over
pessimism.

"There
are two Indias in this country," Amitabh Bachchan said, in his
famous baritone.

One India
is straining at the leash, eager to spring forth and live up to all
the adjectives t hat the world has been recently showering upon us.
The Other India is the leash.

One India
says, "Give me a chance and I'll prove myself."

The Other
India says, "Prove yourself first, and maybe then, you'll have
a chance."

One India
lives in the optimism of our hearts; the Other India lurks in the
scepticism of our minds.

One India
wants, the Other India hopes... One India leads, the Other India follows.

These conversions
are on the rise.

With each
passing day, more and more people from the Other India are coming
over to this
side. ...

And quietly,
while the world is not looking, a pulsating, dynamic, new India is
emerging.

And finally:

Now in
our 60th year as a free nation, the ride has brought us to the edge
of time's great precipice....

And one
India, a tiny little voice in the back of the head is looking down
at the ravine and hesitating. The Other India is looking up at the
sky and saying it's time to fly.

Here is
the counterfeit universe laid bare.

It tells
us that the rich don't have a choice (There Is No Alternative), but
the poor do. They can choose to become rich. If they don't, it's because
they are choosing pessimism over optimism, hesitation over confidence,
want over hope. In other words, they're choosing to be poor. It's
their fault. They are weak. (And we know what the seekers of lebensraum
think of the weak.) They are the 'Constraining Ghost of the Past'.
They're already ghosts.

The poor,
the so-called poor, have only one choice: to resist or to succumb.
Bachchan is right: they are crossing over, quietly, while the world's
not looking. Not to where he thinks, but across another ravine, to
another side. The side of armed struggle. From there they look back
at the Tsars of Development and mimic their regretful slogan: 'There
Is No Alternative.'

They have
watched the great Gandhian people's movements being reduced and humiliated,
floundering in the quagmire of court cases, hunger strikes and counter-hunger
strikes. Perhaps these many million Constraining Ghosts of the Past
wonder what advice Gandhi would have given the Indians of the Americas,
the slaves of Africa, the Tasmanians, the Herero, the Hottentots,
the Armenians, the Jews of Germany, the Muslims of Gujarat. Perhaps
they wonder how they can go on hunger strike when they're already
starving. How they can boycott foreign goods when they have no money
to buy any goods. How they can refuse to pay taxes when they have
no earnings.

Stamp out
the Naxals: They have no place in Shining India

People
who have taken to arms have done so with full knowledge of what the
consequences of that decision will be. They have done so knowing that
they are on their own. They know that the new laws of the land criminalise
the poor and conflate resistance with terrorism. (Peaceful activists
are ogws-overground workers.) They know that appeals to conscience,
liberal morality and sympathetic press coverage will not help them
now. They know no international marches, no globalised dissent, no
famous writers will be around when the bullets fly.

Hundreds
of thousands have broken faith with the institutions of India's democracy.
Large swathes of the country have fallen out of the government's control.
(At last count, it was supposed to be 25 per cent). The battle stinks
of death, it's by no means pretty. How can it be when the helmsman
of the army of Constraining Ghosts is the ghost of Chairman Mao himself?
(The ray of hope is that many of the footsoldiers don't know who he
is. Or what he did. More Genocide Denial? Maybe). Are they Idealists
fighting for a Better World? Well... anything is better than annihilation.

The Prime
Minister has declared that the Maoist resistance is the "single
largest internal security threat". There have even been appeals
to call out the army. The media is agog with breathless condemnation.

Here's
a typical newspaper report. Nothing out of the ordinary. Stamp out
the Naxals, it is called.

This government
is at last showing some sense in tackling Naxalism. Less than a month
ago, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked state governments to "choke"
Naxal infrastructure and "cripple" their activities through
a dedicated force to eliminate the "virus". It signalled
a realisation that Naxalism must be stamped out through enforcement
of law, rather than wasteful expense on development.

"Choke".
"Cripple". "Virus". "Infested". "Eliminate".
"Stamp Out".

Yes. The
idea of extermination is in the air. And people believe that faced
with extermination, they have the right to fight back.By any means
necessary.

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